MONDAY
E-mail a friendLucinda Franks
airdate May 1, 2007
For her series on the radical group The Weather Underground, journalist Lucinda Franks became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She writes regularly for several publications, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and is author of Waiting Out A War, about a Vietnam army deserter, and a novel, Wild Apples. Franks began her career in London with United Press International. Her new memoir, My Father's Secret War, is her recent release.
Lucinda Franks
Tavis: Lucinda Franks is a former staff writer for "The New York Times" who in 1971 became the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She won the Pulitzer for her series on the anti-Vietnam terrorist group "The Weathermen." Her latest project is one of the most acclaimed new books of the year. The book is called "My Father's Secret War: A Memoir." Lucinda Franks, nice to have you on the program.
Lucinda Franks: Thank you, Tavis, nice to be here.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you. This book starts out in a powerful and poignant way; with you telling the story of helping your father later in life - much later in his life - to clean out a closet. And you come across a box - a box that gives you reason to believe a little further down the road, initially, that your father might have been a Nazi sympathizer.
I want to start our conversation by asking how a daughter navigates terrain where she thinks that her father might have been, in his life, a Nazi sympathizer?
Franks: Giving you a little background, my father and I were alienated all my adult life after being very, very close when I was a child. He became remote, distant; an enigma to me during my teenage and my adult life. When I went to help him clean out cartons, I had gotten an eviction notice from his landlord, saying that he would be evicted if the health trap and the fire hazard of an apartment that he lived in wasn't cleaned up.
I came in and there were teetering towers of cartons everywhere that he hadn't unpacked. So with a heavy heart, I started unpacking them. I found it tiresome, was throwing away old files of my mother's. And then there I found a box sealed securely with duct tape. I opened it. There were silk maps, a button that turned into a compass, and other odd things.
And then below those, I found a Nazi cap, an iron cross, and other Nazi memorabilia. I went to him; he wouldn't talk about it. And then I began the six-year search to find out what these items meant. What happened was during my childhood, my father was very sensitive to the Jewish people and the right of the Jews to have a homeland.
He got very emotional when he talked about Jews. So I put aside, pretty much, the theory that he was a Nazi sympathizer, and I found that he was - through my research and through pushing him to tell me details, I found out that he had been a spy. And one of the ways I found out besides finding the Nazi memorabilia is an incident that took place in a bar which he was waiting for a table in the restaurant, surrounded by friends.
A fellow behind him made virulent anti-Semitic remarks. My father, who was 75 at the time, suddenly flew through the air, decked the man, pinned his arms down to the ground, and put his thumb on the carotid artery of this fellow, trying to kill him. And my father was a perfect gentleman who had never raised his hand to anyone.
His best friend got him home; he broke down and he said he went berserk because all the memories of him being a spy in a concentration camp came back.
Tavis: Tell me about your father's life as a spy in this concentration camp. What's that like?
Franks: It was a horror for him that he never, ever got over. He had a room right next to mine, and I would hear him in the middle of the night yelling, "No, no, stop, stop." And I never knew what this meant. As soon as I began my search, I realized that it was not only the Nazi camp that he'd gone into and the horrors that he had seen, but the things he was forced to do as a spy, and the things he had seen.
Tavis: Give me - give the viewer some sense of the stuff that he was forced to do.
Franks: He was forced to assassinate people. He assassinated a Nazi Gestapo officer, which didn't bother him that much, actually. But when he was ordered to assassinate a good friend of his who had worked with him under cover, a Frenchman in Alsace, he - because he was a double agent; he was passing information.
Tavis: Selling secrets, yeah.
Franks: Yes, passing information to the Russians. My father had to kill him in the back of the head. Apparently, blood and everything spurted all over my father, and he never got over that, either. And so he went through his life as a different person then when he went into the war. He was closed off and he was trying to protect his family from the terrible things he had seen.
And also, he was trying to protect his family from the repercussions of things he had done, because he gave an oath of silence when he left his spying days, and he promised he would never talk about any of the missions he had done the rest of his life. But I think he lived in fear that some of the relatives, the associates of the people he had had to assassinate would come after us.
Tavis: Let me ask - and I want to go somewhere with this, so let me ask two or three questions in succession here, if I might, to get to where I want to go. Let me start by asking first you to tell me more expressly about your relationship with your father when it was good. When you were young - I want to stay there just for a second - tell me about you and your father's relationship when you were young. Those years that right now bring a smile to your face even as I ask the question.
Franks: Right, absolutely. He was magical. He could assume five identities in the space of a week. On a Monday, he would take me bounding through the fields, catching butterflies with nets he had made himself, mounting them under glass. Tuesday, he would teach me how to ride a bike - not just riding a bike, but riding it with no hands.
Wednesday, he taught me how to hold a pistol when I was five years old and shoot pineapple cans off the porch, watching the juice spurt out, and it was a delight. He was an expert in everything he did. He did everything you can imagine, from being an expert in jazz, in Civil War, history, a tournament bridge player, an expert marksman, a fluent language learner - he spoke fluent German, Japanese, French. He was the top in everything he learned.
Tavis: Fair to say at that stage in your life, then, your father is your hero.
Franks: He was more than my hero. I depended on him for everything, and he would give me such reinforcement as a child. And later, I found out that this was because children don't ask questions about their parents' past. Teenagers and adults probe a little more, and that is when he shut down.
Tavis: Let me advance - that's where I wanted to go. When the relationship with your father turns tepid or things get a little timid, what's the source of that? I don't want to go too far, 'cause I want to get to the end here. But when the relationship changes, what's the source of the change in the relationship?
Franks: He was remote. We would start a board game and he would drift off in the middle. The only thing I remember is when I was 12 years old, just prepubescent and entering my hippie stage, we played a game in which we tried to find out who could write smaller. And we'd take a sentence and we would write it smaller and smaller and smaller, and he always won because it was miniscule writing that we had to read by magnifying glass.
And I found out later in my search that this was because he was taught as a spy to write tiny messages on tiny pieces of toilet paper, actually; stiff, European-style, brown toilet paper - that he could swallow if he was approached by the enemy.
Tavis: The same kind of stuff you found in that box, in fact - some toilet paper in that box.
Franks: Yes, yes, exactly.
Tavis: All right, so here's why I asked those two questions in that order, because I want to get to the third stage. If I were to put, from reading the text, if I were to put your life with your father in three stages, there's that wonderful period in the beginning where he's your hero, it turns a little strange in the middle, but in the end, when you start to discover who your father really was and what your father had done, I get the sense he ends up being the same hero at the end for what he had endured and sacrificed that he was for you at the very beginning.
Franks: Absolutely. It was a circular pattern that almost had a spiritual quality to it because of that. I had - immediately when I found out that he was keeping Nazi memorabilia, I started to question him. I used every reporter's trick in the book, because I had worked as an investigative reporter for "The New York Times," the "New Yorker," and I just kept pushing him until there was a time when he forgot that he was supposed to forget.
And he was able to talk fluently about his experiences, and in doing this he became - from a failure, what I thought was a failure in his life; he lost his marriage, he lost his job, he turned to alcoholism, he turned to adultery - I hated him for this. But when I found out what caused all this, when I found out that he had been a daring spy that had lived with the repercussions, that had given, really, his life for his country, I just changed completely.
And I think he saw the admiration in my eyes, and he became close to me. And for the first time in my life, he said - he looked at me and he said, "I love you." And that was a moment when I just hugged him and for the three years that he lived, we listened to jazz, we went walking together, we were inseparable in the same way - I fell in love with him all over again.
Tavis: I suspect that somewhere in this conversation - more expressly in this book - there are some abiding lessons for girls, for women watching right now who are trying to navigate strange relationships with their fathers, but I'll let you decide what that is when you pick up Lucinda Franks' new book. The book is called "My Father's Secret War: A Memoir," by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lucinda Franks. Nice to have you on the program.
Franks: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: It's my pleasure.
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